Wailing Into The Void

Did Sarah Palin just tell me to vote for Obama?

I don’t know, but I agree with Matt Yglesias that if you’re going to vote it down, and you accept the consensus view that we are in some sort of crisis, you owe it to the American public at the very least to a) offer a reasoned explanation for your rejection of the plan and b) put forth a plausible alternative.

I’m fully in sympathy with people who have their doubts about the desirability of the bill that was brought to the floor today, but surely one has a responsibility to lay out some alternative course of action. Even spelling out “we should do nothing, let large banks fail, assume money will flow elsewhere, etc.” could qualify you to participate in the conversation. But just bleating vaguely about socialism and saying mean ol’ Nancy hurt your feelings doesn’t really cut it.

Short version of John Boehner today:  We were going to save the country from imminent financial collapse, but then Nancy Pelosi said something that rubbed us the wrong way, so American can now suck it.

The TED spread hit a record high 3.48 this morning.  A high TED spread is apparently bad news for the markets.

Do we call a gaffe about a gaffe a metagaffe?

I’m glad I’m not a Mets fan right now.   Eliminated on the last day of the season for the second straight year following a devastating loss in the 2006 NLCS.   Oof.

Have a bunch of them line up at 7:30 on a Sunday morning to see you in a town hall meeting only to be told you decided to cancel your appearance the day before.

Gary Cohen keeps calling this the “final day at Shea,” even though there still exists the possibility that the last regular season game at Shea will take place tomorrow.

I’m sure I’ll be getting a lot of debate reactions tomorrow.  I’ll actually do something useful with this blog for once and report what I find.  It’s going to be slacker journalism at its purest.

While my initial reaction to the debate was there was nothing there to sway anyone already firmly or even tentatively in one or the other candidate’s column, there are a few polls suggesting that undecideds were somewhat more impressed wth Obama.  It will be interesting to see if this is reflected in the tracking polls over the next couple of days.